Archives for April, 2006

As a followup to my post about abandoned walrus calves, here is a nifty plugin for Google Earth that allows anyone to track the movements of radio-tagged walruses in the Arctic. The page is in Danish, but I think ScienceBlogs readers are smart enough to figure out how to download and use this stuff. Many…

There’s been a lot of justified hullabaloo recently over the fate of Arctic polar bears. You see, they’re drowning in record numbers as their habitat, in an eyeblink, drastically changes from the ice floes they’ve known for thousands of years to open ocean. The only possible good news taken this terrible situation is that they…

Non-U.S. Stochastic readers, we’ve heard you. You tried to answer the Seed survey, tried to fill in the questions about where you live, and all you got was a lousy selection of U.S. states to choose from. We’re sorry. Seed knows (and loves) that we have readers all over the world, and we’re working on…

In my former life, long before I had even heard of Seed, I studied 17th century English literature and dipped occasionally into history of science. One of my favorite figures in 17th century science was mad, bad Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, who lived from 1623-1673. Cavendish wrote poems, plays, and novels, as well…

The New York Times reported yesterday that many of the authors of the DSM-IV, the sine qua non diagnostic manual (I’m 300.00, thanks for asking) for mental health professionals had ties, either before or after their involvement in creating the manual, with the pharmaceutical industry. The implication being that there was something wrong with this.…

Has anybody been following the Letters page of The New Yorker recently? Quick recap: TNY writes something about Capote, which film includes a character named William Shawn, who was in fact the editor of TNY for a great many years, and who enjoys a tremendous reputation for excellence among the literary lights of New York.

What would you do if someone told you it was possible to get merrily drunk with none of the unsavory consequences? No hangovers, no unidentifiable party injuries, no “where-did-this-tattoo-come-from” screams the following morning? What if you also heard that there was a pill you could pop to sober you up quickly, giving you the option…

Seriously. Who are you, yeah you, the one reading ScienceBlogs, right now? Seed wants to know, and we’re hoping that you’ll tell us, by replying to the brief survey that you can find in the right-hand column of the ScienceBlogs homepage. As though love alone weren’t enough to motivate you, survey completers will be entered…

At 4:20 in the afternoon, on April 19th, 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann deliberately ingested 250 micrograms of LSD-25, a substance he had discovered during experiments with alkaloids of the fungus ergot. Despite the vanishingly small dosage, he soon found himself stricken with dizziness, euphoria, and an inescapable compulsion to laugh. Within the hour,…